On layered transmission in clustered cooperative cellular architectures

“Layered” rate-splitting based transmission strategies are investigated for the uplink of cellular communication systems employing clustered cooperative processing. Accordingly, partial decoding of some received out-of-cluster “layers” is employed, while undecoded “layers” are treated as noise. A two-dimensional Wyner-type system model is considered, by which only adjacent cell interference is present and characterized by a single parameter α ϵ (0, 1]. Focusing on the average throughput per cell, the setting is shown to be equivalent to a certain multiple-input multiple-output (MIMO) multiple access channel (MAC). An achievable average throughput is then obtained by efficiently solving an appropriately formalized Complementary Geometric Programming (CGP) problem. Singnificant performance enhancement is demonstrated compared to non-cooperative single-cell processing, as well as to “naive” cooperation, where out-of-cluster interference is treated as noise.